The present invention is related to systems management, and more specifically to scalable systems management abstraction framework.
A system may include a plurality of devices. These devices may include computing devices, desktop systems, laptops, automatic teller machines (ATMs), servers, storage devices, input devices, output devices, hand held devices, etc. System managers many times use commercial systems management software to manage the devices in the system. This software enables a relatively small staff of associates to perform actions on a large number of managed devices through the use of automation. Companies, groups and individuals responsible for system management have long recognized the scaling limitations of all commercially available systems management software and tools. These limitations prevent users from managing hundreds-of-thousands of devices from a single interface.
System management software, such as software that may be licensed from IBM Tivoli called Tivoli Configuration Manager (TCM) is currently used in some systems to manage the system's devices. A typical TCM infrastructure defines a “management region” server for no more than 10,000 devices. This means that as a minimum, a system environment with 230,000 devices would require at least 23 TCM servers to service all managed devices. The TCM software does not scale sufficiently to allow users to manage all of the managed devices from a single interface.
Management regions can be “inter-connected” together with a hub server to create the appearance of a single management region. Unfortunately, there are severe practical limitations to the number of regions that can be joined together at one time. Therefore, using native TCM software to distribute software to all the managed devices in a system requires users to interact directly with multiple regional hubs, a very time consuming and tedious task. For example, if the native TCM solution was used to distribute software to all 230,000 devices, users would need to identify what management server a target device is managed from then add that target device to the list for the associated hub. This task would be repeated for all 230,000 target devices and result in a list for each hub. Users would then need to upload the list to each hub server, login in, submit their jobs, and then monitor the progress of each of the jobs from each hub server. The user could use a native GUI desktop for each hub server, but again, there are also severe limitations on the number of users that may use simultaneously use the desktop so this is not a practical option.
Further, the TCM application includes a very fine grain security model as part of the product. Unfortunately, the granularity of the security model translates to significant configuration complexity for the user. This complexity is further compounded when management regions are interconnected since it is now necessary to synchronize security settings across all inter-connected management regions.